The book explores the transformative power of everyday creative disturbances, or ‘creative ruptions’, to shape ethical and innovative educational futures.

The ‘creative ruptions’ we discuss in our chapter are drawn from our research on Music for Life, grounded in many years of participation within the Music for Life team. Through the research we have found new ways to understand this longstanding improvisational practice, and also to articulate the special contribution it can make to our understanding of education more broadly.

By combining our practical knowledge of Music for Life with some emerging ideas about social theory which are sometimes called ‘posthuman’, we were able to pick up on the special ways in which this musical practice is rooted in our bodies rather than our minds and has a collective, experiential musical character rather than an individualised one. Thinking about the practice together with this theory also helped us to understand some of the ways that those living with dementia have shaped this innovative creative work over the years.

In the chapter we introduce three of the big ideas we have been considering in relation to the practice, which are:

• Sensing: we explored how different ways of working with words help us to value different kinds of participation in the project – releasing language to the ‘wilds’ we allow it to become playful and full of possibilities, allowing us to think in more open-ended ways that facilitate creative possibility in our music making.
• Response-ability: we uncovered the care-ful qualities of the music making that rely on all those involved being receptive, responsive and open to staying with uncertainty. We identify this as the ethical core of the work – a reciprocal and caring exchange.
• Transitions: we focused on the ‘in-between’, transitional character of the work – the musical feeling of being on a threshold where anything may happen. We described this as the ‘liminal space’ – we found that this space is crucial on the project, opening all those involved to the possibility of learning and change.

We are indebted to the Wigmore Hall Learning team and to all our research participants. Our writing team has been Ursula Crickmay, formerly Director of Learning for Wigmore Hall, and Caroline Welsh, a founding member of the Music for Life musician team. We finish with some individual reflections on the experience of researching together:

Caroline: Over the years I have found it increasingly difficult to find words that are up to the task of describing all that Music for Life can be, to find ways of discussing this work that don’t immediately feel too far away from being in it. Words alone don’t fully speak the language of feeling, of the senses, of space charged with possibility and potential, of exchange and encounter entered through uncertainty, attentiveness and openness.

Steeping myself in the unfamiliar world of academic writing and research together with Ursula has introduced me to the wild ideas and thinking of posthumanism - an area I didn’t know existed and struggled at first to make sense of at all. The more we’ve worked, talked and explored these ideas, though, the more I find them deeply thrilling, like a bracing sea breeze! They are imaginative, poetic, playful and curious, making sense of experiences that resonate through the whole Music for Life programme: joyful shared endeavours that emerge spontaneously; moments of quickening energy and connection; the irresistible transformation that such glowing moments enable in all of us; the way that we are changing each other in each living moment with the energy of our attention.

Ursula: I have been conducting this research as part of a PhD that I embarked on following many years leading the Learning programme at Wigmore Hall. It has been such a privilege to be able to get to know the work in this different way. I have found the research rewarding not only because it has helped me deepen my understanding of musical practices, but also because, through projects like this book, it has become part of an urgent conversation about the future of education. The research is rooted in music making and draws on the knowledge of lots of different people, including musicians and those with dementia. Building on this diverse foundation has highlighted different ways of approaching education, resisting narrow, standardised views that fail to engage with the big challenges we face globally in the 21st Century. Learning alongside the musicians and other participants in Wigmore Hall’s Learning programme has helped me to uncover a diversity of different ways of engaging with the world that open up more hopeful, ethical, diverse and creative possibilities for educational futures.

Find out more by reading the book: it is available open-access via publishers Palgrave MacMillan:

Creative Ruptions for Emergent Educational Futures, is edited by Kerry Chappell, Chris Turner, and Heather Wren. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-52973-3